UConn President Issues New Rules for Speakers and Programs In Wake Of Arrest of Gateway Pundit's Lucian Wintrich

Rebecca Lurye / Hartford Courant / Hartford Courant

Lucian Wintrich of Gateway Pundit was arrested and charged with breach of peace following an altercation at his event, "It Is OK To Be White," at UConn.

Lucian Wintrich of Gateway Pundit was arrested and charged with breach of peace following an altercation at his event, "It Is OK To Be White," at UConn. (Rebecca Lurye / Hartford Courant / Hartford Courant)

After last week’s inflammatory speech and arrest of far-right conservative Lucian Wintrich, UConn President Susan Herbst issued detailed guidelines Monday for speakers and events on campus, including a requirement that all guests or affiliates accompanying the speaker be identified.

“We will not allow events or other programming to take place at UConn if the university determines that an individual involved represents a danger to our community and the safety of our campuses,” Herbst wrote in an email to the campus community. “Speech and safety do not conflict with each other, and we do not have to choose between them. Instead, we must do all we can do to ensure that both are able to exist simultaneously on our campuses at all times.”

Still, advocates for free speech and civil liberties raised question about the impact of the new guidelines on free expression on campus.

Herbst wrote that while Wintrich had no criminal history or record of disruption, “the university was disturbed to later learn that an individual traveling with him — whose identity was not known in advance by the university — has at least one arrest for a violent offense, in addition to other very troubling aspects of his record.”

That individual, who has been identified as Salvatore “Sal” Cipolla, was hovering around Wintrich all night and shooting video.

Rebecca Lurye

Salvatore Cipolla with Lucian Wintrich at UConn.

Salvatore Cipolla with Lucian Wintrich at UConn. (Rebecca Lurye)

According to the Huffington Post, Cipolla has marched alongside neo-Nazis, and has been arrested multiple times, including once for punching a 19-year-old woman.

Wintrich, who was delivering a speech that disturbed students on Nov. 28 at UConn, was charged with second-degree breach of peace when he retaliated after a woman in the audience, Quinebaug Valley Community College adviser Catherine Gregory, took the hard copy of his speech from the lectern. Wintrich grabbed her to retrieve it, “pulling her back in a violent manner,” according to a police report.

Herbst said that expanding the pre-event review process to affiliates of a potential speaker will allow additional facts to be known beforehand “and acted on accordingly.”

She said the protocol for speakers and events will include a mandated review of events that could potentially pose a safety risk to campus, including a meeting of student organizers, UConn Police, the university’s student affairs office, and other relevant university officers.

Planning for security and a response plan for disruption will be included as well as outreach to counter-protest interests.

Daniel Byrd, who served as president of the UConn undergraduates last year and is now at UConn School of Law, said he thinks the new guidelines are a “step in the right direction” to ensure that the university is prepared for whoever comes to campus. “I don’t think students see this as a measure preventing people from coming,” but rather he said, a way of assessing what campus reaction might be and “preventing it from getting out of hand like it did” with Wintrich.

Irma Valverde, the current president of the UConn undergraduates said in an email that Herbst and UConn students “support free speech. The guidelines put in place ensure freedom of speech moving forward while also making safety a priority. Freedom of speech is important, but let's have productive conversations about race not just racist bigotry. "

Civil liberties groups, however, raised questions about whether the guidelines could hamper free expression on campus.

Will Creeley, senior vice president for legal and public advocacy with the The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a nonprofit group that focuses on civil liberties in academia, said that if a public university “conditions the ability of its students to hear ideas” based on what appears to be an “elaborate evaluation of their past” or the possibility that violence or protest might ensue, “then students rights have been eroded.”

“It’s worth noting that in our nearly two decades of defending speech for college students and faculty, we’ve seen the safety rationale used to silence everyone from Bill Ayers to Mumia Abu-Jamal,” he said. Ayers was a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago and a former leader of the radical antiwar group, the Weather Underground; Abu-Jamal is a convicted murderer, activist and journalist.

“What we always ask is that any determination about student or faculty speech or their invited guests be made as transparent as possible,” he said. “Otherwise invoking safety can become a pretextual excuse for avoiding or simply silencing speakers that the UConn administrators would rather not hear from. The danger here is that this will be employed by partisans on each side of the ideological divide to silence speakers they don’t want to hear.”

“You don’t have to sacrifice free speech for safety but you have to be very clear about the criteria you are using in order to evaluate possible security concerns,” Creeley continued. “And again those determinations really should be made by local law enforcement with recognition of the fact that public universities have to be kept open for dissenting and controversial, even outrageous or offensive ideas.”

Dan Barrett, the legal director of the ACLU of Connecticut said in a statement, “The devil is in the details of how UConn decides to implement the proposed changes to its speaker policy. We will keep a close eye to see what effect, if any, UConn’s proposed speaker policy changes have on free speech.”

Stephanie Reitz, spokeswoman for the university, said in an email that the university won’t accept or reject programming based on content, but on whether the students affairs and public safety departments, identify a program or a component of it that the university feels “poses a physical threat to the community.”

If such a threat is identified, Reitz said the student affairs and public safety departments would consult with others at UConn, including the president’s office.

“What the ‘action’ would be would depend on what the threat is,” she said. “In the Wintrich case, for example we would have told the College Republicans that if they wanted their program to move forward, the man that the Huffington Post later wrote about [Cipolla] couldn’t be part of it because of his violent past.”

She said the university means ‘safety” as in actual physical safety, not another definition such as “emotional safety.”

“It’s critical to emphasize that these changes are not about finding reasons to cancel programming,” Reitz said.”It is about making sure that student groups and the university are both aware of what a particular speaker or program may entail so we can plan properly, which could include taking steps to mitigate possible risks that fall short of canceling a speaker.”

“It is adapting to the times we are living in – we’ve seen extreme or controversial speakers or groups come to campuses elsewhere in the nation,” Reitz said, “and the outcomes were very problematic.”